The Kings of the Kasilof

Editor’s note: Here’s another bit that I wrote while up in Alaska. I had hoped to post to my journal every day, thus making this blog a lot easier, but it just didn’t happen. On a similar note, it was pretty funny that the four of us were roughing it, but still needed an extension cord and a power strip to charge all the toys we brought. A laptop, two cameras, three ipods, one ipaq, a couple pairs of thump glasses (excellent for airplane sleeping – I suggest Thievery Corporation), and three cell phones (dad intentionally forgot his)…

Okay, so I may not be the greatest fisherman in the world, or even in my group, and I may be pretty badly sunburned and mosquito-bitten, and I may have gotten hypothermia today, but c’mon…that’s nothing new. More interestingly, here are a few things I can officially cross off my list of never-dones:

Saw a wild moose and her cub (kid? kitten? mooselit?), saw a wild sea otter, saw a whole phalanx of wild eagles, saw a wild puffin (which are more like seagulls than penguins, it turns out), and I even saw a man shoot a fish.

I tried and fell in love with salmon that had been caught (not by me), cleaned and smoked all within a matter of hours. I did catch two halibut, standing next to a man who worked for Halliburton. I bought salmon jerky, though I haven’t yet tried it. I text-messaged people from more than 4000 miles away.

Today I sat in a small boat with my brothers and my dad and we talked with our native guide about things as importantly mundane as how to smoke pulled pork, and we shot the shit over how fishing is a metaphor for life, even though they were just trying to make me feel better about the king salmon I hooked and lost. Fishing, by the way, is a metaphor for nothing, but rather an entity unto itself meant solely for
brothers, fathers and local guides to bond over statements like “fishing is a metaphor for life”. Whiskey helps. Catching a lot of fish helps more. But at the end of the day, you really just need enough rods for everyone, and a tolerance for “hee-hee, I said rod” jokes.

Tomorrow we’re going to try for more king salmon on the Kenai River. My big salmon catch is still out there. (My FIRST salmon catch is still out there…) And even though I’m about to fall asleep on my keyboard, I’m going to poor another whiskey and go re-join the group. Maybe I’ll take the salmon jerky out with me.

The day actually started out pretty foggy. We were on a river called the Kasilof (about a half hour away), where we met up with Tyson, our nine foot tall guide. John took this pic, which was about 5am, if I remember right. It never got much darker than this.


It turned into a nicer day pretty quickly, and we started peeling layers off as the sun came out. (later in the day, it started to rain, and the breeze on this river keeps the mosquitos away, but made it feel like about twenty below. We decided then and there to buy winter hats and gloves before the next day.)


This was a neighboring family staying at the same lodge. I forget where they were from, but they were San Antonio fans, in direct but friendly smack-talk competition with another family staying nearby from Detroit. Those two boys knew their basketball. And their smack-talk. On the left is a TRL employee named Aaron, who came to be a pretty good friend of ours.


We pulled over for a pee break. Always check for moose first. That’s Tyson on the right, who, like an ice burg, is actually 90% under the water’s surface right now. That kid was huge.


Neener neener. I didn’t have to hold a fish and get my hands all dirty… sniff. I actually did hook one, but the bastard broke my line before I could get it into the boat. If fish had middle fingers, that one would have shown me his.


Later, back at the ranch: a celebratory whiskey shot. That’s a bottle of Middleton Rare, by the way. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.



Go on to Wednesday!